Tag: janet

How popular is the baby name Janet in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Find out using the graph below! Plus, see baby names similar to Janet and check out all the blog posts that mention the name Janet.

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Number of Babies Named Janet

Posts that Mention the Name Janet

In April of 1937, the film A Star Is Born was released. It starred Janet Gaynor and Fredric March as a married couple at opposite ends of their Hollywood careers: hers beginning, his ending.

The husband was named Norman Maine. The wife, on the other hand, had several identities. At first she was North Dakota farm girl Esther Victoria Blodgett. Then she morphed into movie star Vicki Lester for most of the film. Finally, in that memorable last line, she said: “Hello everybody. This is Mrs. Norman Maine.”

So how did she go from Esther Blodgett to “Vicki Lester”? Here’s the scene:

Everyone in the office started chanting the newly minted name Vicki Lester…and with that the star was born.

On the name charts, the entire name-group — Vicki, Vickie, Vicky, Vickey, and so forth — rode a wave of trendiness that started in the ’30s, peaked around 1957, and was over by the ’80s. It’s hard to say how much of this trendiness (if any of it) was fueled by the movie, but one thing definitely attributable to the movie is the higher-than-expected usage of “Vicki” in the late ’30s:

1941: 542 baby girls named Vicki [ranked 274th]

1940: 405 baby girls named Vicki [ranked 316th]

1939: 334 baby girls named Vicki [ranked 355th]

1938: 367 baby girls named Vicki [ranked 332nd]

1937: 148 baby girls named Vicki [ranked 555th]

1936: 82 baby girls named Vicki [ranked 738th]

1935: 70 baby girls named Vicki [ranked 822nd]

Notice how the number adjusted downward in 1939 before the name was picked back up by the wave.

Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that several baby girls born in the late ’30s were named “Vicki Lester.” In 1940, for instance, the Seil family of Washington included parents Orval (26 years old) and Beryl (25) and daughters Arlene (4) and Vicki Lester (1).

Vicki Lester Seil on 1940 U.S. Census

History repeated itself in 1954 upon the release of the first A Star is Born remake, which starred Judy Garland as Esther/Vicki. The name Vicki was again nudged upward a few years ahead of schedule:

1958: 7,434 baby girls named Vicki [ranked 57th]

1957: 8,101 baby girls named Vicki [ranked 51st]

1956: 7,762 baby girls named Vicki [ranked 57th]

1955: 7,978 baby girls named Vicki [ranked 52nd]

1954: 8,220 baby girls named Vicki [ranked 50th]

1953: 6,822 baby girls named Vicki [ranked 61st]

1952: 6,774 baby girls named Vicki [ranked 61st]

And, again, records from the mid-1950s reveal a handful of baby girls named “Vicki Lester.”

The second remake — the 1976 Barbra Streisand version — didn’t include the name change. Even if it had, though, the popularity of Vicki was plummeting by the ’70s and I doubt the film could have done much to boost its image/usage.

Currently the name Vicki is only given to about a dozen baby girls in the U.S. per year. But another version of A Star is Born is in the works — a Lady Gaga version slated for 2018. If this third remake materializes, and if it features the name Vicki, do you think it will influence the baby name charts?

(While we wait for 2018, check out the original version of A Star is Born (1937), which is in the public domain.)

This cat is keeping a close eyeon the baby name charts…The 2016 Pop Culture Baby Name Game will run until mid-May, but it only covers last year — what about this year? Which baby names will see movement on the U.S. charts in 2017 thanks to popular culture?

Here are five possibilities:

Halley, for the baby born on the TV show Big Bang Theory in mid-December, 2016.

In 1995, researchers Herbert Barry and Aylene S. Harper invented a way to score personal names to determine how “male” or “female” they sounded. Names with positive scores on the scale were more female-sounding, and names with negative scores were more male-sounding.

“Female” attributes:

+2 points if the accent is on the 2nd or later syllable (Elizabeth)

+2 points if the last phoneme is unstressed and schwa-like (Sarah)

+1 points if the last phoneme is some other vowel sound, not a schwa sound (Melanie)

-2 points if the accent is on the 1st of 2 syllables and the name has 6+ phonemes (Robert)

The authors looked at Pennsylvania baby names from 1960 to 1990 and discovered that the average phonetic gender score for girl names and boy names had become more “female” over time.

Several years ago, linguist Anika Okrent used the same scale to analyze national baby name data from 1880 to 2013. She noticed the same trend — stretching back to 1950 and continuing until today.

Her theory is that the shift was essentially fueled by shifting trends in boy names. As names like Donald gave way to names like Elijah, the result was an overall rise in the average phonetic gender score for boy names. This in turn triggered a corresponding rise in the average phonetic gender score for girl names “in order to maintain the gender distinction” (i.e., Janet giving way to Olivia).

Oodles of multiples — eight sets of twins, one set of triplets, six sets of quadruplets, and one set of quintuplets — were featured in an early 1944 issue of LIFE magazine. Most of these multiples had been born in the 1920s and 1930s.

Curious about the names? I knew you would be! Here they are, along with ages and other details.

Twins:

Marjorie and Mary Vaughan, 19.

Lois and Lucille Barnes, 21.

Betty and Lenore Wade, early 20s.

Robert “Bobby” and William “Billy” Mauch, 22.

They had starred in the 1937 movie The Prince and the Pauper.

Blaine and Wayne Rideout, 27.

They had been track stars at the University of North Texas in the late 1930s along with another set of twins, Elmer and Delmer Brown.

Charles and Horace Hildreth, 41.

Horace was elected Governor of Maine later the same year.

Ivan and Malvin Albright, 47.

Auguste and Jean Piccard, 60.

“Honors as the world’s most distinguished pair of twins must go to Jean and Auguste Piccard, stratosphere balloonists, who are so identical that not everyone realizes there are two of them.”

Triplets:

Diane Carol, Elizabeth Ann, and Karen Lynn Quist, 11 months.

Quadruplets:

Claire (boy), Cleo (boy), Clayton (boy), and Connie (girl) Brown, 3.

Janet, Jean, Jeraldine, and Joan Badgett, 5.

“The customary alliteration in multiple names accounts for the “J” in Jeraldine.”

The ratio of Biblical names to non-Biblical names in the girl’s top 20 is about the same today as it was 100 years ago, though the ratio did change a bit mid-century.

(In contrast, there’s been a steady increase in the number of Biblical-origin names among the top boy names.)

Here’s the color-coded table — Biblical names are in the yellow cells, non-Biblical names are in the green cells, and several borderline names (which I counted as non-Biblical) are in the orange cells:

27%-73% is remarkably similar to both 25%-75% (smaller 2014 sample) and 30%-70% (1914 sample).

So here’s the question of the day: If you had to choose all of your children’s names from either one group or the other — Biblical names or non-Biblical names — which group would you stick to, and why?